JEFFERSON MORLEY, morleyj@gmail.com, @jeffersonmorley
Morley is editor of the blog JFK Facts. He is also editor of The Deep States website. His books include The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton and the forthcoming Scorpions Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate.
Files relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were supposed to be released on Tuesday, but late on Friday, in a Friday news dump, President Biden stopped the release and issued a statement: “Temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”
Morley said today: “People are wondering if there’s a smoking gun in the files. The failure to abide by the law is the smoking gun. Biden has delayed it, as Trump did. There’s no reason they won’t delay it more. You have to hand it to the CIA. Since the day the president was assassinated, they have engaged in decades and decades of deception and delay.”
In a recent piece co-written for The Intercept, Morley wrote: “When President Donald Trump faced the same decision four years ago, he delayed in the name of national security. While releasing thousands of files about the 1963 Kennedy assassination, Trump acquiesced to the demand of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to keep portions of thousands more secret until October 2021, 58 years after Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested as the gunman. For all his ‘deep state’ rhetoric, Trump issued a memo giving the executive branch agencies four more years of secrecy. …
“The most sensitive JFK secrets involve U.S. operations against Cuba in 1963. Oswald was a public supporter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, or FPCC, a popular campus group which defended Fidel Castro’s government from aggressive U.S. policies. Records declassified in the 1990s revealed that the CIA targeted the FPCC for disruption in September 1963. Within the records that have been partially released, propaganda sources, deception methods, and surveillance techniques are often redacted.
“One passage in a file on Operation Northwoods, a top-secret Pentagon operation that aimed to provoke a U.S. invasion of Cuba, is still off-limits to the public. Approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in May 1963, the Northwoods plans envisioned an ‘engineered provocation’ to replace Cuba’s socialist government with a pro-American regime. Northwoods called for the ‘the most trusted covert personnel’ to stage a spectacular crime on a U.S. target and arrange for the blame to fall on Castro, so as to create a ‘justification for U.S. intervention in Cuba.’ The Northwood plans were discovered by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997. Two paragraphs of the 200-page document remain classified in 2021.”